This week was big for our 8-year-old, Ellie.
She started guitar lessons.
She has been asking us for months now to let her start lessons. We had it in our minds that she would start with the piano and move on to other instruments from there.
A lover of music and singer-songwriters already, she had little interest in the piano. She wanted to pick up a six-string.
Thanks to my oldest brother’s generosity, I have a couple of nice guitars in my home office. I do not play them, but they have been there for quite a while.
Earlier this year, I actually began taking guitar lessons.
That was one day a week for 30 minutes, plus practice a few days a week at the house.
Like exercise, it just wasn’t in the cards for 2024, at least for now.
I’d love to become proficient at the guitar and learn to play some of my favorite songs.
It just has never come natural to me. I’ve tried to pick it up several times over the years, but it never did take.
My brothers, on the other hand, are great guitar players.
During my freshman year of high school, my family took a day trip over to Vicksburg from Yazoo City, and we spent several hours in some pawn shops overlooking the Mississippi River.
There was a small, inexpensive guitar in one of those shops that my dad purchased.
My oldest brother was 19 at the time, and he began to strum out a few chords from some music books my mom had laying around the house.
He literally never took lessons. He was self-taught from those books.
While most aspiring guitarists begin playing simple songs like You Are My Sunshine and Red River Valley, my brother learned very complicated melodies and chord progressions.
He learned to finger pick, and he excelled at the 12-string acoustic guitar.
In later years, my younger brother picked up the guitar rather easily as well.
His style was more electric. He is still very good at playing lead guitar.
I spent many hours with both of them, especially my oldest brother, listening to him play and also playing roadie for the several bands he was in during college.
Occasionally, I would pick up his guitars and strum out some chords.
My hand-eye coordination just wasn’t there.
But one of the great pleasures I have in life is still listening to great singer-songwriters play acoustic guitar.
That is something I hope that I have successfully passed on to my daughters and hopefully will to my future son.
When Ellie came home from her lesson the other day, she begged me to take the guitar back out of its case so that she could show me the exercises she had learned during her first instruction.
After that, she began looking up songs on the internet to see which chords she would have to learn in order to play them.
One of them was Lover by Taylor Swift.
I can’t say that I’m too excited about that one, but she’s a Swiftie whether I like it or not.
The second song, however, was an obscure Gordon Lightfoot song called The Mountains and Marianne.
She said that is going to be the first song that she plays when she learns all of the chords.
I’ll take that trade any day.
Perhaps one day she will be as good on the guitar as Taylor and she will have a poetic mind like Gord and she will contribute something positive to the musical world.
We need good music and a positive message these days.
